1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a power controller and a power control method and, more particularly, is suitably applied to a portable contents player that reads out and reproduces contents stored in a hard disk drive.
2. Description of the Related Art
A recent portable contents player uses a semiconductor memory as a storage means, and the adoption of an internal battery power to read out and reproduce the contents stored in the semiconductor memory supports the portability of the player.
For the acquisition of contents data transferred from an external host Personal Computer (PC), a portable contents player is generally connected to the host PC through a Universal Serial Bus (USB) cable.
Some portable contents players perform a data transfer with USB power only supplied from a host PC through a USB cable. Such portable contents players generally do not require external power source such as an AC adapter, and preserve the battery power of the internal battery (dry cell) (refer to, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2001-142580 (pages 12 to 13, FIG. 31)).